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Thursday, May 21, 2009

The resurrection of West End Games

The demise of West End Games has been postponed and the release of Bill Coffin's Septimus game, the product that nearly killed the company, has been announced for August. My first experience with WEG was the original Star Wars RPG. A great game to be sure, although some of WEG's writing schemes struck me as a bit underhanded. In particular, they would provide stat blocks for prominent characters that referenced numerous other publications. In order to get a full description of the Emperor, for example, you would need to purchase three or four other books. Clearly, this was a marketing ploy, but it was such an obvious and clumsy one that it gave the buyer the sense that he was being ripped off. WEG is owned by a different person now and I wish the company all the best. Having said that, none of their current IPs interest me all that much (except maybe Shatterzone for which they have no future plans other than as an add-on to TORG), so I doubt they will have much success extracting any of my hard-earned shekels.

By the way, Septimus is set inside a Dyson sphere with a radius of about 1 AU. That makes the inside surface area approximately 100 quadrillion square miles. We're talking about a pretty big map.